MYSTICISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETYwhen expressed in the way Bergson states it, but it is nonetheless perfectly consistent with
traditional philosophy’s desire to capture eternity in time, the unchangeable laws of
change itself, to conceive movement only as the realization of an untimely possibility.^5 In
the account Bergson provides of the history of ancient and modern philosophy, all their
important differences notwithstanding, the Platonic idea that knowledge is of the eternal
remains unchallenged and continues to guide, explicitly or implicitly, philosophical in-
quiries.^6 What comes into existence, what is born in time, has its law, reason, or cause
elsewhere; it is nothing but the incarnation of a possibility that precedes it.
The conversion Bergson is calling for is thus a conversion of philosophy to time. As
the termconversionsuggests, for philosophy it is not so much a matter of changing the
objects of inquiry (it could hardly be argued that ‘time’ has not been a philosophical topic
prior to Bergson) as of changing its way of looking at them, of transforming its own
desire. Philosophy should become capable of turning away from the longing for eternity
if it has to think the power of time, which, according to Bergson’s famous claim, ‘‘is
invention or it is nothing at all.’’^7 That such a conversion is not an easy task, or that such
a claim is not an easy one to grasp, is proven by the long series of remarkable philosophers
and readers—from Heidegger to Adorno, from Merleau-Ponty to Foucault, to name just
a few—who dismiss Bergson’s conception of time on the grounds of its supposed subject-
ivism and the dichotomy between time and space, thus sidestepping the question of the
new, and with it the entire Bergsonian philosophical project.^8
The assumption that the possibility of things precedes their existence comes down to
denying the reality of the new, to speaking of time without thinking it, to erasing the only
feature that defines time, its power of creation. But how, then, should the power of time
be thought? InCreative Evolution, Bergson seeks to show that his project is not merely an
abstract metaphysical hypothesis. The Darwinian discovery of the evolution of life, with
the production of new and unpredictable forms of life, as well as of new ideas and new
concepts that can grasp them, imposes on both science and philosophy a rethinking of
time. Time can no longer be thought of as an exterior frame, in which events follow upon
one another, but rather in itself has to be conceived as constituting a genuine force of
agency—to the extent that Bergson identifies the very essence of time with a creative
power along the lines of what could be called a properly ontological pragmatism: if time
doesnothing, itisnothing.^9
The critique of the category of the possible is the necessary consequence of thinking
time asduration. Bergson explores the psychological and subjective dimension of duration
in his first book,Essai sur les donne ́es imme ́diates de la conscience(1889; also rather unhap-
pily translated asTime and Free Will); he gives a metaphysical and ontological account of
it inMatter and Memory(1896), his second book. But it is not untilCreative Evolution
(1907) that he establishes the missing link between a subjective experience of time and a
philosophical hypothesis by means of the ‘‘fact’’ of the evolution of life. If some examples
of the retrospective illusion of the possible come from art and politics (Romanticism and
PAGE 593593.................16224$ CH29 10-13-06 12:37:03 PS